In February 2016, a young intern was waiting to speak with the founder and chief executive officer of Surbhi Gramodyog Vikas Sansthan (SGVS), a producer and supplier of hand-made herbal cosmetic products. The founder was speaking on the phone with a potential reseller and turning down a new order due to the company being at full capacity. It was the third such request that he had declined in the past week. The young intern was puzzled. SGVS was located in Kashipur, a small town in the state of Uttarakhand in India. With a minimal Internet presence and marketing efforts, it had gained loyal customers in India and across the world, from the United States to Australia. However, SGVS was not willing to increase production capacity and expand the business, thereby forgoing a potential increase in profits. Was the company’s reluctance to scale up the business sustainable over the long run?

CARE’s Rural Entrepreneurship and Agribusiness Promotion project is a new, market-driven approach to development in Kenya. Although the project has been successful from a development standpoint, it is not commercially viable. The sector manager must determine how to improve the project and make it commercially sustainable.

The CEO of a multinational company wanted a new human resource team that operated in Guangzhou (China) to recruit and select 85 individuals for different positions throughout the enterprise. These positions included finance managers, production managers, security guides, workers for the factories, secretaries and interns. The members of the human resource team that dealt with these tasks were highly diverse in terms of their educational background (e.g., marketing, law, human resource, public relations, general business administration) and countries of origin (e.g., Canada, China, Germany). The team had to deal with a series of challenges in order for the project to be successful. These issues included a decision about task-specific job requirements, methods to assess these job requirements, strategies for recruitment, methods for personnel selection and final decision making. The team also had to deal with diversity within the team, and cross-cultural issues as well as with the leadership behavior of its CEO.

The Oracle acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005 seems like ancient history (at least in technology years). In fact, the PeopleSoft acquisition is not even Oracle’s latest major acquisition (Siebel was acquired in September 2005). One of the primary reasons that Oracle acquired PeopleSoft was to gain access to the 10,000+ customer base of PeopleSoft (and JD Edwards), which provides more than $1 billion in annual revenue. This customer base is a gift that keeps on giving in the form of a lucrative maintenance stream. Discusses options that PeopleSoft customers and, by extension, other enterprise software owners pursue to minimize enterprise resource planning (ERP) ongoing costs of ownership. Encourages students to evaluate several criteria that can be used to lower ERP costs.

Case Name : La Vaca Independiente: Should a Social Enterprise Adopt a For-Profit Business Model?

Authors : Chris Laszlo, Anya Briggs

Source : Ivey Publishing

Case ID : W13445

Discipline : Organizational Behavior

Case Length : 10 pages

Solution Sample availability : YES

Plagiarism : NO (100% Original work)

Description for case is given below :

This case presents a social enterprise considering whether a for-profit model might be an effective way to scale its impact. Mexico City-based La Vaca Independiente (The Independent Cow) was founded to bring art to underprivileged children. The founder observed that many global problems are caused by humanity’s increasing state of isolation, with individuals disconnected from the planet and from each other. She concluded that most benefit corporations address outcomes of isolationism, but that La Vaca could target the matter directly. La Vaca focused exclusively on a program called Developing Intelligence through Art (DIA). Using artwork as a stimulus for thought and discussion, DIA provided individuals with opportunities to develop meaning in their lives. She believed, based on evidence that companies lose annual revenue due to the effects of isolationism on their employees, that she and her team could pursue a for-profit business model in order to expose La Vaca to markets and opportunities inaccessible to a charitable organization.

Case Name : Digital Opportunity Trust’s Business Model for Social Enterprise Work

Authors : Dima Jamali, Bijan Azad

Source : Ivey Publishing

Case ID : W13171

Discipline : Strategy

Case Length : 16 pages

Solution Sample availability : YES

Plagiarism : NO (100% Original work)

Description for case is given below :

A social enterprise organization, whose mission is to battle poverty and gender discrimination through providing access to technology, is faced with the prospect of losing some or all of its government funding in a time of global recession. Under the legal structure of a non-governmental organization, Digital Opportunity Trust has partnered with large corporations and other organizations and established a local presence in disadvantaged areas. It has worked in a partnership setting to mobilize the information technology knowledge of young people and train them to become leaders of change in their local communities, which in turn will give them the relevant skills and experience to support their own career paths. The organization’s striking success has been driven by its innovativeness and, more particularly, its noticeable efforts to reconcile the corporate and non-profit aspects of doing business, along with the challenges that come with it, without compromising the quality of the social enterprise brand that it is bringing forward.

Pinnacle West is in the energy-related services business and headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. Its largest subsidiary, APS, is a power utility that serves over a million customers across Arizona. The case was written when one of the biggest recessions in recent history hit global and U.S. markets. Written from the perspective of the vice-president and chief information officer, the case chronicles the various recent successful process change initiatives at Pinnacle West. The vice-president has achieved initial success in instituting a process-oriented culture inside his own information technology (IT) services organization, and in some specific business units within Pinnacle West. He now faces a significant crossroads in his process orientation strategy for Pinnacle West. He has to devise a strategy for a wider rollout of a process-oriented strategy throughout Pinnacle West and determine if the larger enterprise is ready for this strategy. He has to consider various issues in making this decision – resource availability, change management competency and buy-in from other top-level managers. He has to carefully weigh the various options in rolling out this strategy, as he fears that any misstep may derail his carefully executed plans for bringing a process-oriented approach to managing at Pinnacle West. This case can be used in an introductory systems course. It can also be used in a course on business process management or operations management.